


Count your blessings (you might loose some)

by Give_Me_A_Karking_KitKat



Series: Two sides of the same coin (too scratched up to be used) [1]
Category: Scarlet and Ivy Series - Sophie Cleverly
Genre: Angst, But not in like one go, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I mean it's not actually but it IS, Ivy Grey has Depression, Ivy Grey has insomnia, and also Ten Little Indians from Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, my poor poor children, over multiple random nights, to Regina Spector's Machine, whoo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:08:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24954286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Give_Me_A_Karking_KitKat/pseuds/Give_Me_A_Karking_KitKat
Summary: Somewhere along the way, between Scarlet not-dying and the confrontation in Miss Fox's office, parts of Ivy shrivel up and die.Aka: Ivy has a lot of issues, one of which is co-dependencey. Another is depression.
Series: Two sides of the same coin (too scratched up to be used) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1944772
Comments: 7
Kudos: 6





	Count your blessings (you might loose some)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snekwami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snekwami/gifts), [clickingkeyboards](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/gifts).



> I'm sorry. I'm tired and depressed and I thought too much about how much Ivy's life just sucks in the first book and then I went and wrote this

When the letter arrives, Ivy feels a swell of hope that maybe it contains good news, that maybe there's a possibility she will be able to go to school, maybe it's good. And then she reads it. And Ivy- she doesn't believe it. Scarlet is so full of life, it simply doesn't _compute_ that she's dead. Scarlet is brash and bold and boisterous, loud and present in a way Ivy is not, she can't be _dead_.

But that is what the letter says, in no uncertain terms.

Ivy feels a sob rising up in her throat, and she sinks to the floor with the letter crumpled in her hand, a horrible wrenching feeling tugging at her heart. Scarlet is dead. **Dead**. They are never going to be famous together, never going to see the world, never going to live out their dreams because Scarlet is dead and Ivy is nothing without her. Ivy is a weak mirror of her sister, and she can't be a mirror image if the original is gone. Scarlet is Ivy's tether, her everything, the person who made her smile even when father was furious, and their stepmother cruel, who laughed and danced and played pranks, who grinned without a care in the world and made her happy, who sent letters to help with the loneliness, who did so much to keep her happy.

And she is dead.

Outside, the world goes grey, and stormy, and it stays that way inside Ivy's mind for far too long. Blank and grey and awful, and the rain pours down and Ivy's world ends.

(It takes over a year for it to restart, buffering in sadness and grief the entire time.)

Ivy wonders if she could drown in the rain.

⁂

It pours down at the funeral too, oddly fitting to Scarlet's dramatic tastes, and Ivy can't stop crying. Her stepmother sneers at her, but that doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as the way her father avoids her eye, glancing away from her like she is too painful to look at, and it is just another reminder that when people look at her, all they see is a worse version of Scarlet. The weak, weepy, mirror.

Scarlet would be much more composed, like everyone wants, if it were her at Ivy's funeral. Father would look her in the eye and the sky would only be overcast, and she wouldn't be crying so hard she can barely breathe, and everything would be alright because Ivy was always only ever second-best. Why was it Scarlet?

Everything she sees reminds her of Scarlet, and it is like a strike through the heart. She can't bare the sight of her own reflection, because when she looks, Scarlet looks out, trapped in a mirror world, with no hope of escape. When she looks at her father, she remembers Scarlet cursing him out over the re-marriage. When she looks at her stepmother, she remembers Scarlet screaming at her to leave her alone. Scarlet is everywhere. Scarlet is in her house, complaining about their stepbrothers, she's in the park, talking about the future, she's at the graveyard, searching for their mothers headstone (surely it must be here), she's in the studio, practicing ballet, she's at the funeral, making fun of everyone's outfits-

She's six feet under.

No one but her seems to care that Scarlet is dead, that the world has ended, and they go through the funeral without actually caring - or crying. They all remain conspicuously dry-eyed, although Ivy's not particularly sure Aunt Phoebe really knows what's going on. Ivy is alone in her dispair, in her grief. A tide of sadness sweeps her feet from under her, and part of Ivy dies with Scarlet.

⁂

Ivy shuts down for a while after the funeral, her brain playing the last time she saw Scarlet on repeat.

_"It'll be alright, Ivy!" Scarlet says, giving her a brief hug. "I'll send you so many letters it won't even feel like I'm gone, and staying with Aunt Phoebe isn't so bad!"_

_There is something guilty about her grin, but Ivy can't quite place it- too distracted by the thought of being separated from Scarlet._

_"You promise?" She asks, rubbing her hands nervously._

_Scarlet's grin softens a little, become a bit less brittle and forced, and a bit more sympathetic and genuine._

_"I promise."_

Scarlet had lied. Ivy had felt her absence as keenly as though she were missing a limb, and now she will never get the feeling of being whole back again. There will always be a Scarlet-shaped hole in her heart. She can't _function_ without Scarlet. So she doesn't. Days blur into a grey mess of sadness, and exhaustion, and the awful sensation of things being missing. Ivy catches herself waiting for letters that will never come, staring at the door as though just wishing hard enough will make Scarlet appear.

Of course, it never does, but that doesn't stop her. She knows, she _knows,_ Scarlet is dead, but it doesn't seem to quite register. She is waiting for someone who will never come home (just like Aunt Phoebe).

⁂

Aunt Phoebe calls her Scarlet a lot. Every time, it sends a lance of sadness through her, and she barely refrained from tearing up the first few times. She doesn't know what she is doing, but that doesn't make it hurt any less.

Ivy wishes she could bring herself to correct her, but the grief steals her voice away, and so she shuts down instead. Eventually, she learns to ignore it.

(It is funny, in a way; this trains her for Rookwood, hell on earth.)

⁂

Even when everything seemed bleak and awful, a little tiny piece of her flickers with the faint hope that maybe, maybe, Scarlet wasn't actually dead. Maybe she was still alive, because Ivy didn't see her die, didn't see her body. It's stupid, but it lets her power through the (countless) bad days, driving her forward.

Ivy is pretty sure she'd collapse into a useless heap without that little flickering flame, so she hangs onto it, even though she knows that it is not right.

⁂

If she pretends hard enough, it is almost easy to believe that Scarlet is just at bording school, and that she'll get a letter from her sometime soon, probably starting with, _"I'm actually alive! Surprise! It was all just a big prank, don't be a wet blanket about it."_

Scarlet is- was irritating like that.

The longer it goes on, the more Ivy feels unmoored, like she's not all quite there, and the faintest breeze could send her flying away. She goes into little trances, coming back to herself to find the tea burning, or, alternatively, the entire house cleaned thoroughly. Scarlet would make fun of her for being such a mess, spacing out like that.

Scarlet can't make fun of her ever again, can't be an annoying voice in her ear, suggesting something dangerous and stupid and fun, ruthlessly insulting people and goofing off. Scarlet can never be anything but dead.

Ivy would give anything to have Scarlet back, getting them into trouble, being annoying and rude and everything Ivy is not. But that will never happen, and it sort of breaks something in Ivy, makes it so she cannot stand being alone, and Aunt Phoebe is never really all there, and she knows nobody else for miles.

She is all alone and she hates it, she **hates** it. She _needs_ her twin.

Before all of this, Ivy used to like her alone time, used to wish she got more time away from the sheer rambunctiousness that is- was Scarlet. Now all she wants is the ability to hug her, pull her into a crushing embrace and never let go.

⁂

Then Miss Fox arrives. And as terrible as the endless blank days had been, it has nothing on the horror **she** causes.

The car ride to the school feels like something out of Dante's Inferno, a special circle of hell all for herself. She feels jittery and awful and can't quite stop herself from crying. Scarlet wouldn't cry. Scarlet would get **mad.** But Scarlet isn't here. And Ivy has to take her place.

Scarlet's not dead to the pupils of Rookwood. It doesn't make any sense. Ivy doesn't know what's going on, but for the first time since Scarlet's death, Ivy feels motivated to do something- to find out what happened to her twin.

But being Scarlet is _hard,_ especially since she is meeting many people who knew Scarlet that she doesn't. She doesn't know her way around the school, which seats are Scarlet's, who Scarlet was friends with (Ivy has a sneaking suspicion that the answer to that is nobody) or what she's supposed to be doing. She's been thrown in the deep end without a float.

And Miss Fox is more than happy to let her drown.

(The irony of this is not lost on her later, when she gets shoved in the pool and very nearly ends up staying there.)

⁂

At first, it is so very hard to be Scarlet, to think of Scarlet, that Ivy makes a few critical mistakes, lets things slip that she _knows_ Scarlet would not, but she can't bring herself to play her role properly.

It turns out Scarlet having a twin wasn't common knowledge, and Ivy is not quite sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, it certainly makes it harder for people to guess she's not who she says she is, but on the other, it makes her feel even more irrelevant. Like she is not real and never was to begin with.

She tells Ariadne, because otherwise she feels she might go insane with it, and Ariadne believes her. Ariadne believes her and it is such a relief, but Ariadne also can't stop seeing Scarlet overlapped with Ivy when she looks, as personality traits twist and fold into each other, and it hurts more than she thought it would. Already she is loosing parts of herself to Miss Fox's twisted solution, and she **hates** it.

Her twin's death (is she still a twin if her twin is dead?) seems more and more suspicious by the minute, Miss Fox in particular seeming wholely _off._ She decides to investigate, prompted by both the Diary in the bed and the strange circumstances surrounding her replacement.

Something is up, and she owes it to her twin to at least try and find out what.

⁂

To be Scarlet, she needs to be bigger, louder, more than she has ever been before, and the thought of drawing attention to herself kind of makes her want to shrivel up and die, but she doesn't really have a choice. She has to, if she wants to find out what happened leading up to Scarlet's death.

And god, that is worth any price. Ivy would loose all of herself just to find a hint of Scarlet, would do anything and everything just to _know._ Ivy needs to know more than she needs to be herself. So she makes herself loud, and argumentative, and blunt and as close to her sister as she can manage, but it's not enough.

She doesn't quite feel herself anymore, not quite Scarlet, and certainly not Ivy.

(Ivy got left behind in a haze of grief, Ivy only lives in the past, Ivy was weak and frightened and she couldn't stay. But Ivy can't make herself Scarlet, doesn't have her flare, or short-temperedness, or passion, so she floats somewhere in between, the same way she sometimes looses herself to the nothingness, and drifts.)

⁂

Things go wrong, they're always going wrong, and Ivy's hands smart while her brain frantically tries to go through what it knows, desperate to understand. She doesn't have all the information, and that infuriates her, because how is she supposed to be Scarlet if she doesn't even know what major things Scarlet _did?_ It is impossibly frustrating. It turns out her nightmares at least have one perk- they shorten her temper enough that she's almost as quick to anger as Scarlet is- was. It's a lot harder to keep calm and rational against a sea of restless nights.

That being said, Ivy hates Penelope Winchester with a passion that she thought only Scarlet could have.

Somehow, she hates Miss Fox even more.

⁂

There turns out to be another perk to her lack of sleep- her grades drop to about Scarlet-standard without any effort. It's almost impressive.

⁂

She feels like she is fracturing at the edges.

Scarlet is dead, but Ivy doesn't exist anymore, can't exist anymore, so who is she? She is not Scarlet, not brave and reckless and fearless, and not Ivy, not shy and quiet and sensible, and she doesn't know who she is.

She is amazed more people haven't seen through her deception, because she is bad at a proper Scarlet, even if she gets closer with each passing day. And she doesn't like that, doesn't like how it's getting easier and easier to be Scarlet, because she's _not,_ and being Ivy has begun to feel like a game of pretend, in the short seconds she can let her slip. She is not Scarlet and she is not Ivy and she is not really anyone at all anymore, just a girl playing pretend.

She can't sleep, can't stop tossing and turning with theories and questions and ruminations, and she is sure that is not helping her Scarlet, but she can't stop. She can't slow down enough to sleep, because if she does, she's worried she'll loose all motivation and stall, like her father's car after a long day. Scarlet was so bright and boisterous and brilliant, and she can barely manage the energy to pretend.

⁂

The sky is dark and Ariadne is snoring, but Ivy cannot get back to sleep, eyes wide open. She can feel herself shaking, in a sort of distant way, and she knows that if she could see herself, her eyes would have that dead look in them.

Scarlet haunts her dreams, dead and alive and injured and perfectly fine, grinning and laughing and screaming and weeping, not real even though Ivy _desperately_ wants her to be, warping in her dreams until Ivy wakes with a scream in her throat and tears running down her cheeks.

She doesn't tell anyone.

Scarlet wouldn't want anyone to worry.

⁂

Ivy isn't fully convinced Scarlet is dead anymore, and it sets something wild and hopeful loose in her chest, because Scarlet might not be dead and that would fix _everything._ But then she has to reckon with the fact that she still might be, and her euphoric mood crashes with enough force that it's jarring. If Scarlet is dead, categorically, Ivy is not sure she has the strength to go through the grief all over again, without the possibility for denial.

If she is alive, they are going to have _words_ about the test and the broken piano, but mostly Ivy is going to hug Scarlet so hard she'll break something.

⁂

Ivy stumbles through lessons, some deep tiredness trying to pull her under, and barely manages to throw up a passable sick Scarlet in defence. She can't slip now, she's so close, she just _knows_ it.

She's going to find her twin and everything will be fine and maybe she can go back to being Ivy (nevermind that Ivy doesn't really exist anymore, beaten out of her with a cane and lost under a sea of anguish) and Scarlet will hug her and everything will be normal again and it'll be alright and it will be **fine.**

Ariadne sends her worried looks, and she realises somewhere beneath the exhaustion that she doesn't really know the last time she slept a full night, too caught up in night terrors and trying to unpick the puzzle of Scarlet's dissapearence.

It doesn't really seem to matter, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> It's probably important to note that Ivy is NOT a reliable narrator.
> 
> Once again, thanks to Snekwami for listening to me ramble about Scarlet and Ivy, and Clickety for beta-ing this!


End file.
